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Blue Ocean Film Festival emerging as medium to convey Climate Change’s Story

Submitted by Andrea Cordell on Sat, 11/08/2014 - 12:37

Some of the world's most acclaimed ocean filmmakers and Hollywood activists converged at the Blue Ocean Film Festival, world's biggest documentary festivals in Florida.

The Blue Ocean event is considered one of the world's most prestigious environmental film festivals. It came into existence in recent years, including the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in Wyoming and the Environmental Film Festival in Washington.

According to Debbie Kinder, organizer of Blue Ocean, this festival is a call to action. It's not just about whales and fish in the sea and beautiful beaches rather it's about humanity, generations and about our future.

The event will be screening James Cameron's 'DeepSea Challenge 3D', which chronicles the filmmaker's solo dive to the deepest place on Earth, nearly 7 miles beneath the ocean's surface in the Mariana Trench.

Fabien Cousteau, grandson of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and a filmmaker himself, said that so-called 'cli-fi' movies allow people to view a changing part of the world through the prism of an anecdote.

Cousteau and a team of filmmakers and scientists dove 63 feet below the ocean's surface in the Florida Keys to study how pollution and climate change is having an impact on coral reef earlier this summer.

He documented the 31-day underwater living experiment in a film, which was shown at the festival. According to Dan Bloom, the activist credited with coining the "cli-fi" term, documentaries are powerful, but feature movies with film stars and vivid storytelling are also pieces of the equation.

'Cli-fi' is a genre term for novels and movies based around the themes of climate change and global warming. It takes its name as a shortening of climate fiction, much as science fiction is often shortened to "sci-fi".

Bloom cited that 'Soylent Green', the 1973 science-fiction film depicting a dystopian Earth coping with the ravages of overpopulation is an early example of 'cli-fi'.

He said, "We need to go beyond abstract, scientific predictions and government statistics and try to show the cinematic or literary reality of a painful, possible future of the world climate changed".